To Begin Again?

I am toying with the idea of starting back up with this blog. But I am afraid. That is all.

It's Not That I'm Mad at Christianity. Really.

Most of the time, I feel like it never hurt me. I usually think of it, completely without malice, as this funny little inoffensive thing that people believe in, like Santa Claus. I remembered just now, though, that what seems like a silly fantasy that helps people sleep at night can actually affect laws and people's notions of civil rights. Seen in this light, Santa Claus grows a pair of bloody fangs and starts mouth-breathing and looks a lot scarier and weirder.

Y'all Evangelical Christians can be so batshit crazy, so publicly, and somehow get away with it. It's amazing to watch it happen in the media. I mean, your leaders can get on national television and say things that make about as much sense as "ALL HAIL SANTA'S SECRET FLAMINGOES!" and people will actually listen, light their torches, and get super motivated to go do something about this serious lack of secret flamingoes in Santaland RIGHT NOW!

Which brings me to what inspired this little monologue: I just watched Jesus Camp, and I shuddered to think of the ways in which the scenes are familiar. I was so young and impressionable then. *sigh* Yes, it's true. Most folks don't know this about me-I sortof block out the memory, for the most part-but I have to come forward as a former Evangelical. Given, I was a preteen who was looking for something to fill a void in my boring rural life with excitement, intensity, and a feeling of spiritual connectedness, and I got just that. But I can't deny that for a couple of years, a young, intellectually feeble version of me--but me, nonetheless!--chose to be a part of a church just like the one in that kooky documentary. Here is the trailer:



(Pause: I don't mean to offend any of y'all Rocky Mount churchy sorts who have for some reason facebook friended me. You know I peaced out of that place with a brazen heretical swagger, so I'm sure you could expect this.)

But seriously. Church on the Rise and that other Pentecostal Holiness place we went before that were Ab. So. Lute. Ly. BONKERS. Evangelism, like LSD, can interfere with one's sanity after prolonged exposure. I was lucky to put it down before it took up residence in my prefrontal cortex. I hope you all escaped before it turned your rational faculties to jelly too.

Does the sweet gay guy in denial still play keyboard, I wonder? I hope he's out of the closet by now. Poor guy. Hey, but who knows...if that guy can think he's straight because God wants him to be, then maybe I can make myself into a flamingo by believing I am one! Flamingoes are awesome! And PINK!

And maybe they live on a secret magical island with Santa...and maybe we should base political decisions on this story! Yeah! Grab your torches, children of Claus! We'll smash their microscopes and telescopes and weather vanes so they won't be distracted from the TRUTH of the Lord Claus! We are in a war for validation!

Jesus would laugh at you. Or maybe spank you with cruel relish. If he weren't dead, that is.

Is There a Ghost in My House?

I was just thinking of that Band of Horses song. But seriously, a few days ago I had a very creepy dream that I was house sitting and there was a sort of poltergeist, except that its way of haunting was to overtake people's brains and make them hallucinate that horrible things were happening. It was kinda like that movie The Craft. Things crawling on me, my limbs turning into granite, and so forth. I'm not sure what to make of that, but the dream was surprisingly willing to let go of my emotions when I woke.

In fact, my inner emotional landscape has changed dramatically since I quit smoking. All kinds of things that would normally penetrate my psyche all the way to through are only thumping against the surface. I can barely hear the noise. It's not at all like despair, although it results in waves of a sort of anguish and guilt about how truly cold to and distant from the rest of humanity I feel (or, you know, don't feel). I was just telling my dear roommate about how relatively easy it would be to watch things die right now. Let me know if you need help slaughtering a bunch of Thanksgiving turkeys; I'm your man. Got some baby bunnies that need drowning? Call me up.

...I jest. Nevertheless, it's super weird to feel like all the empathy has evaporated out of me. Also, nothing really excites me at all. It's like my average operating mood is leveling out at slightly below neutral, and the only way I can go is down a bit more. I wonder how long I can take it. Personal effectiveness at the cost of joy is not a fair trade.

The nicotine monster has such elaborate schemes for worming its way into a person's head. What a bastard. It can actually make me think that I may never be a person I would like to hang out with again.

On a completely different note, I just finished reading a lovely book by Naeem Murr called The Perfect Man. When I tried to describe it to someone recently, the best I could come up with was that it is sort of like To Kill a Mockingbird written for an adult audience by an acolyte of William Faulkner. I imagined the main character as a more grown-up version of this beautiful, charming, and wildly talented Indian child who practices at the dojang with me.

That's it for today. I'm headed off to first wedding anniversary dinner #1. Mmmm Thai noodles.

The Big Quit

I am writing on the fourth full day of my quit. Yep, that's right, I've quit smoking. I think that I knew that it would happen this way; thus, I've never bothered to really try to quit before the precise moment when it happened.

Most smokers have had the occasional experience of looking down at the stinking little death-stick in our fingers and felt a sense of bizarre alienation from the act, wondering how the hell it came to be that these stupid little things run our lives and boss us around all day as they slowly kill us. It has happened to me many, many times, but I've always managed to eventually shrug and decide that now is not the time to deal with it. Just take another drag and be done with that little flight of fancy, I said to myself, because you can't quit.

And then Monday night, with no warning, I suddenly knew with objective and detached certainty that the cigarette in my hand as I drove home from work was the last one. I only enjoyed it as much as any other cigarette. I looked at it a bit. Rolled it around in my fingers, slowing down time, giving myself the opportunity to withdraw the motion. But it never passed. I waited a few more hours, and at the end I was still certain. So I calmly handed my cigarettes over to David and told him to do something with them because I am done.

I'm done. For today. And the next day. And the next day...

The AA approach--"I will always be an addict"--is actually proving to be helpful. The whole one day at a time method is also working. There are a few other tricks I'm developing to help ease the process too, such as vividly imagining the nicotine monster as this nasty little asshole that whispers horrible things in my ear, since I then have the option of ignoring it after telling it to fuck the fuck off.

Nighttime is terrible. Everything has turned upside down; I used to hate mornings and look forward to the hours after dark, and now I loathe the dark. It surrounds me with restless boredom, fills me with nervous irritation, and explodes in angry, frothing shrieks of self-loathing that almost reach my throat. I hope that I don't decide to start blogging on a particularly horrible evening, but if something really snaky and cruel appears for a day, please know that it's the little monster talking. Maybe I'll leave it up so I can remember what a little bitch it is.

More to come later.

Been a Long Time Gone

Since D and I got hitched, we've been rather busy with all sorts of projects. We've gotten a new dog, a new camera, and a new five-year plan. In fact, after our belated wedding reception this weekend, we're headed back to Asheville for good! Yippee! Anyhow, here I am again, and at first I plan to try to post lots more of my backlogged photography, and then who knows what.

<3 Figwasp

Declaration of Chaos Control Initiative.

This is another post that proves what I mean about this blog being truly miscellaneous in nature. Personal ruminations on my life and goals right now...

I am in the midst of a crisis of self-efficacy. By which I mean that lately I lack strategies for conquering a pervasive sense of helplessness that has negatively shaped and colored my emotional, material, and real-waking-time life. (My dreams haven't been very disturbing, which is one sign to me that it isn't too late to avoid a meltdown.) I aim to get to the bottom of this and fix it before it's out of control in the kind of ways that friends, students, employers, and potential compatriots note and remark upon.

I try to avoid the language of 'destiny' and other such tricky and anti-pragmatical hocus-pocus. However, without origins and gods and cosmological speculation, I know, nevertheless, that I have important shit to do on this earth. Period. Examples: starting a free school, traveling the world, keeping my heart free from all the captivating but worthless, mediocre shit that surrounds me, and even just sticking to the lonely path of living up to my own ideals within a capitalist-military industrialist-falling empire type of society. I know that these goals and all the others require a calm and lucid subject of their enactment--i.e., little old me.

I also know that certain psychological reflexes that I exhibit in stressful situations are counterproductive to these aims. Therefore, my immediate crisis requires some immediate attention, so that I do not become so distracted by self-involved, melancholy, and anxious introspection that I lose touch with what is important about my place in the human and material world that I desire to inhabit.

My perceived source of stress and feelings of helplessness is definitely my work--as in, the work I get paid to do, teaching developmental English courses at a community college. I am very, very new at this on several levels, despite having some previous experience teaching high school English.

First of all, since Asheville, Burnsville, and rural Nash County are all full of white people, I am experiencing what I couldn't call culture shock, but rather cultural...um...adjustment? This is one aspect of the stress that I believe is quite positive. My range of intercultural exchange has expanded dramatically in the past few months I have spent in Greensboro; in addition to my born-on-American-soil students, whose skin colors and cultures vary widely, this semester I have also taught or tutored immigrants (and refugees) from Vietnam, Korea, China, Laos, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Mexico, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Togo, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Ghana. Last week, I taught a Laotian man how to use a word processor. I help new English speakers to master subject-verb agreement. I help one really old countryfied lady to develop strategies for reading and comprehending college-level texts. I help many single mothers to conquer the systems that cannot help but to stand in opposition to their dreams of giving their children a better future. The fruit of my efforts gives people confidence in new surroundings, new opportunities...

Despite the positive and even transformative experiences on that front, I feel like I am stumbling through my classes and my preparation for them every day, just trying to hang onto all the little strings that want to unravel. Unfamiliar curricula aside, my main problem is the despair and anxiety that I feel every time a new grading project comes my way, which is an almost daily event. I manage my time poorly, at least partly because of the drudgery and complication I associate with grading piles of tests or essays. My spirit revolts against the idea that this paper in front of me can tell me anything about what a student has learned! Although I am always fair and consistent about grades, I cringe every time I am required to put a big ugly number on someone's paper, especially given all the context surrounding...ugh, all of it!

I could rail all day about why I hate grading, about how it feels like trying to read vital signs from a dead rabbit, but the point is that the anxiety that this produces creates a mental block on everything else that is important to me, like planning lessons, reading books, playing music...and all I can do is fret with furrowed brow about what I "should" be doing but cannot seem to begin. This leads to lags and snags of all sorts.

With the help of my brilliant partner--my hero of the week, or lifetime, by the way--I developed a short list of guidelines for myself which do not, and cannot, address the larger issues at work here, but may be able to help me avoid falling to bits and failing in a big way.


GENERAL GUIDELINES AND PRINCIPLES FOR DISCIPLINE AND STRESS REDUCTION:

- Leave the laptop at home. Access crackbook and blogs in the early a.m. or later in the evening, when there is no work to do because I have already done it. Use the crappy school PC's for work-related stuff.

- Plan for Monday by Friday. Anxiety-free weekends are essential.

- Habit is good. It will feel unnatural until I reap the rewards, whereupon I will sing its virtues because for example, on my way to see Melt Banana in Chapel Hill, I will have no nagging worries.

- Take care of testing center business promptly, for otherwise, it is promptly forgotten.

- Remember that the purpose is also to create more time for important things like: Going to shows; lovin' on my sweet dyspeptic creatron; playing music; following through on craft projects; cooking; passing the Praxis for ESL; reading books; WRITING; planning interesting lessons for my classes and my language exchange partner; and generally creating a better world.

- Wake the fuck up and have a healthy breakfast, drink tea, and establish bearings early so I can think clearly. Make any "official" phone calls, since it makes me seem like the kind of responsible person who wakes up early to handle shit. Write unambitious but detailed to-do lists in the morning before leaving, so that the unstructured work day doesn't turn into a mess of confused half-efforts.

- Read more Kozol, radical teaching journals, etc. to stay inspired.

- Keep good, healthy, convenient food around to avoid time- and money-consuming eating habits. Soups, crackers, cheese, avocado, granola, yogurt, Larabars (yum), Thai noodle packs, pre-cut veggies, popcorn, English muffins, and nuts all come to mind.


This is what I have been able to come up with so far. Intriguing, I know. But really, it's the simple stuff that ends up mattering! I don't want to embody Benjamin Franklin's rigidly scheduled automaton fetish...but one must admit that the man was successful.

I would like to know about how all you other aspiring laziness-and-despair conquerors are doing it. ¡Digame!

This is Bound to be Personal in a Tacky, Not-So-Interesting Way.

Feel free to ignore this one. It may not stay up for long.

What a strange few weeks. Not that it's over or anything. We still don't know what we're doing this weekend--Athens, Georgia, or a farm outside Roanoke, Virginia? Blacksburg? Franklin, NC perhaps?

It seems like almost everyone I know is in transition and rather unavailable. I myself am moving into my new house and somewhat away from our little womb of love. Only five blocks away, sure, but it will certainly mean a change, even if I mostly sleep in the same bed where I've slept for the past four months or so. The new house is shaping up to become a radical public school teachers' affinity house.

When we went up to Asheville to try to retrieve my things the first time, we couldn't get the truck because we had both somehow forgotten (duh) to renew our expired licenses. The guys at Penske in Weaverville were really nice about letting us reschedule, which I know they didn't have to do. I felt sure that if we had been in Asheville or Greensboro, we would have gotten a self-satisfied, not-sorry-at-all "Sorry. That's Penske policy."

Foiled master plans aside, we had an interesting weekend.

My list of mini-trip highlights:

- Despite multiple potentially volatile run-ins, the only word creepy ex said to me was "No," and this was solicited by a question: "May I come in?" Furthermore, I have received no psychotic text messages since then. This is a first.
- David being perfectly supportive and making everything better.
- Being magically given a place to stay by Ms. Magical Erin, and then cuddling with her magical cat.
- When asked why he had responded to my question about a Haruki Murakami novel instead of telling me where to turn, Aaron saying, "You asked me two questions at once. I answered the more important one." Also, Aaron saying, "It's my life, isn't it?" when I tried to convince him to stay somewhere he didn't want to stay. I was flushed with affection for him right then, especially after the "Do you think I treat every woman like my girlfriend?" thing. What a rad guy.
- Hanging out at Gaining Ground Farm, where there was a booty dance party in the house (complete with several children under three) and an old-time and gypsy jazz pickin' session by the fire. Nice people.
- Seeing Ken and Ziggy at Broadway's.

Lowlights:
 
- Realizing how utterly terrified I still get when confronted with the possibility of meeting creepy ex face-to-face. I still feel spine prickles of imminent danger when he is near, or even when he might be near.
- Creepy ex not letting me into a 70's African music DJ party I really wanted to attend (hey, but at least...see above), since apparently he is somehow the bouncer? Boo. But I tried.
- Having horrible dreams about creepy ex doing terrible things to me.
- Not sleeping at all and freezing my arse off when we crawled into our tent at the aforementioned farm, and then having to spend the rest of Sunday sleeping instead of getting things done, and then being ill-prepared for class today.
- Not seeing some people, and spending too little time with others.

Just weird:

- Watching the conflict in people's faces as they try to decide whether to talk to me, seeing the embarrassment in their eyes as they fumble to make a choice: Recognize this person's humanity, with which I am very familiar, or be cowed by the inevitable wrath and "betrayal" rhetoric of someone who never gives up a grudge, and who is watching very, very closely?

People can be disappointing. I'm not sure what the difference is between a friend and an acquaintance anymore. I have been unsure for a while now who my friends are. I am inclined to think, from evidence I can gather so far, that Greensboro may be a better place to make them.

Off to sleeping and voting and renewing licenses and teaching. Hum drum dee-dum.  

When You Visit CulturalRevolutionaries.org...

...You find this:

This is an open experiment.
A putting in words of what is already in the air.
The more this declaration is being read, thought or spoken out, the more its energy will manifest in our world and in our society.
If what is written here resonates with you, make it your statement.
Find ways to read it, share it and put it into action.


DECLARATION OF CULTURAL REVOLUTIONARIES 2009

Cultural revolutionaries in 2009…

_live, act, work with and not against nature
_know that life is too complex to understand it intellectually
_build and support local, self-governed economies
_value and safe-guard diversity of all kind
_value interdependence, since they know that nothing is separate
_regard themselves as equal to all life forms
_protect and support life
_love and support children unconditionally
_work on themselves towards greater awareness
_know about ecological principles and integrate them into their lives
_see music and dance as an integral part of their expression and communication
_live on an animate earth and regard it as sacred
_know how to grow their own food
_appreciate their sensory awareness
_celebrate life
_cooperate
_make the shift from thinking ‘either, or’ to thinking ‘as well, as’
_share their knowledge
_understand and integrate process as a way of being
_are not identified with their body, thoughts or emotions
_see the mind as a tool
_realize that there is no right or wrong
_are not identified with any social tag, their past or their future
_are aware that the very essence of who they are is life itself
_take responsibility for their emotions
_are aware of and value their relationships to their living and seemingly non-living surroundings
_value and integrate the wisdom of women
_value and integrate the wisdom of indigenous cultures
_value generalist knowledge
_are aware of change as one of the core principles of evolution
_work towards diversification and decentralization
_engage in and create bonds to the place where they live
_turn from dependent consumers to responsible producers
_are looking for ways so that their interests and talents may unfold
_have the courage to resist and disobey laws that render self-rule, self-provisioning, and self-sustenance illegal
_are informed about the current money system and identify it as a contemporary form of enslavement
_identify and boycott biological, cultural, social and philosophical monocultures
_boycott monopolies of any kind
_question everyone who promotes one solution
_value environmental and human ethics over profit maximization
_boycott corporations and banks operating for profit maximization
_reclaim land and forests as common good
_reclaim water as common good
_reclaim biodiversity and knowledge as common good
_are aware that they participate in the process of co-creation at all times
_allow life to unfold through them

----------------------

(I edited a few typos.)

On a Likert Scales test of my opinion of the viability of each and every one of these for all times and circumstances, there is plenty of variation, i.e. "Sometimes" to "Always." The main reason for any of the "Sometimes" responses has to do with my acute sense of counterculture tendencies towards the exclusion of regular folks. Especially since I have witnessed and admired how many 'regular' folks have an incredibly robust way of living up to several (even many) of these principles, without the presence of any class irony or inflated idealism (as there is with most of 'us' middle-class white anarchists).

Nevertheless, some of the ideas this manifesto expresses may be rather lost on people whose priorities in life skew towards survival within their native contexts. Cultural creativity, for people locked in cultures of poverty and struggle, may have dramatically different meanings from what can be summarized in a few slogans.

There are a few that just seem weird to me. For example, cultural revolutionaries "are not identified with their bodies, thoughts, or emotions?" And they "regard themselves as equal to all life forms?" The authors seem to be drawn to that scary spiritualist territory that I try to avoid (especially in terms of my political convictions), as well as being willing to negate material reality. Then they turn around and mention the value of sensory experience and of being able to grow food. And what about the urban cultural revolutionary? Does she need to own a jackhammer with which to destroy the streets and start gardens to feed the armies of poor people who will of course be willing to dedicate their time to her project? Yeah, right.

I am not cynical, just skeptical.

Nevertheless, much of this manifesto seems very useful. Maybe I'll go on a postering campaign with an edited version that contains the ones I have no trouble buying wholesale, i.e., many of the items that relate to local economies, interdependence, and decentralization of authority. There are a few that don't fit those categories that I instinctually lean towards agreement with, but they all have easily fathomable exceptions. Most things do.

I think this Chinese propaganda poster (via theeastisred.com) rather captures the psycho-social object of my skepticism.

Thoughts?

La Coiffure, le Cheval, et la Maison

The latest from BibliOdyssyey is a brilliant overview of satirical drawings and etchings from the 18th century, all about the enormous and elaborate high-class hairstyles that English ladies were attempting to copy from equally ridiculous French ladies on the other side of the pond.

Apparently, though, the ship-buried-in-hair was no joke. Women really did this. The accompanying article at BibliOdyssey is rather fascinating, if you want to know more.

Here's a very bizarre one from a collection of old prints on the theme of horse anatomy. You can see the entire 2006 post it comes from here.

Which reminds me...I am really looking forward to moving into a new place and starting to decorate. I have had a major itch to nest for a long time now, ever since everything in my life got yanked up by the roots when I left Asheville. Actually, it was probably happening before that, since I never fully moved in to the house in the woods--as soon as I had started settling in there, I was uncomfortable. Then I fell in love with someone who lived three hours away. Anyhow, it has been a long time since I have lived anywhere where I felt present, like it was in any way intelligent or even psychologically possible to get attached. But when I start making things for my walls, I want a big miscellaneous frame cluster stretching across a corner with things like this in the frames.

This light, spritzy rain is lovely. 

Musing on 'Noise,' Plus Saturday Night at My Favorite Things

It's been a couple of days. Things have been busy, with working, cooking, going to shows and promoting the one that I'm...well, obviously, promoting. I met up with my soon-to-be new roommate Sunday, and we squealed like little girls over all the interior design projects we want to work on. I have spent the last hour looking at digital cameras on eBay, and I'm about ready to sell my soul for one at this point.

So, our show on Friday night was just as I predicted--good, fine, fun, with about 8 people there, maybe four of whom did not play at some point. Sometimes I guess you just have to have group band practice. It's like watching porn. Sortof. Andy did figure out that the best place to mic a bicycle is on the rear quick-release handle, which is some kind of progress. Rocket Science sounded ten times better than they did at their first show, and we met a really nice guy named Marvin who seems to be fairly enthusiastic about making noise.

Speaking of which, check out the two pieces from Ex.Tempo that David has finished mixing here.

David cringes every time I call his music 'noise,' but it's just not an insult, see. Certainly not all that he does by himself or with Andy falls into the category, but anything I've heard him do in collaboration with others has mostly fit that description. Much of it is cacophonous noise (music) made by non-musicians, which is at least partly the point. I think I've decided I need to use the term 'noise' more often after realizing that many, many people expect particular things when they hear 'free improv music,' like rhythms and melodies. They often think of 'jam' music or jazz or something else they've already heard. In the interest of accurately describing what other people are likely to hear--people who, undeniably, will probably hate it in the first place and who would probably rather know so they can show up late, and who we'd probably also rather do just that--it seems to me that putting a crudely descriptive name on what only a few consider to be 'music' per se is an acceptable concession.

But holy crap, Saturday night at My Favorite Things! That show was on par with some of the best combo local + touring band shows shows I ever saw in Asheville, which is saying something.

First up was Pinche Gringo, which you can find on Myspace here. I had never seen them before, and I was really impressed with Josh's charisma as a songwriter and vocalist. I mean, the guy plays drums with his feet, plays guitar, and sings his guts out at the same time. I have had a crush on the older guy who played guitar with him since I saw him play with his other band, which I can'tfuckingremember the name of...something 'Charmers?' Anyhow, he's a badass with old school rock and roll chops. I hear a wide streak of Stooges reminiscent punk in Pinche Gringo. Love it, love it, love it.

Next (who knows why so early) was The Lovely Eggs from Lancaster, England. Their Myspace is here. I can't get these super-catchy, occasionally punk-as-fuck candy pop songs or the frontwoman's (Holly Ross) adorable face out of my head. "Have you ever heard a digital accordion?...Have you ever read Richard Brautigan?...Have you ever fought a deadly scorpion?" They are the only band I've seen in a long time that could get away with long sessions of banter between songs--everything that came out of this woman's mouth was hilarious, like her description of her bandmate/partner David's compulsive collecting.

Athens, Georgia-based indie shock-pop freaks Cars Can Be Blue (Myspace here) were touring along with the Eggs. They started off with a song whose chorus spelled out D-E-E-P-D-I-C-K-I-N-G. Hilarious shit. Others were "Hey Hippie" and the dangerously catchy "Dirty Song": "We've been holding hands now for quite long enough...You can sodomize me, get behind and ride me, stuff your cock inside me, proceed to fuck me blindly," etc. ...and this girl (Becky Brooks) looks like a nerdy librarian. Ha! Brilliant.

(Photo of Cars Can Be Blue by Richard Hamm. See his website here.)


The last band to play was Greensboro's Rough Hands (Myspace here), who are somewhat similar and perfectly complementary to Pinche Gringo, but a bit more polished and, of course, more like a band than a guy who can do three things at once. Although they rule, by the time they started playing, we felt rather glutted on good music and were tired. So, after two songs or so, it was off to bed with us.

Anyhow, you should check out all of these bands. For your listening pleasure, I have added songs by some of them (along with a track by Ahleuchatistas, yee haw) posted up in the widget on the top right. They will live there for the next few days/weeks.

Bohemians at Hotel Know It All, Be Advised

 

You've just got to blow this one up really large to appreciate it. This one comes from another great blog called Strange Maps that I wish the author (Frank Jacobs, I think?) would update more regularly. 

The next part of this story is that after I read the post attached to this map, I then tracked down the link to moonbuggy, where it came from...and I nearly peed myself when I pressed 'random image' and came up with this:

HAAAAA! ...and it just kept getting better after that. Go there. See it.

A Bee Lectures Me in Marxism

I had a dream about just that. A dust-covered bee in its last gasps of life told me its deepest political convictions, but the only precise beewords I remember are, "For me, [the problem] is less about power and more about alienated labor."

Unsurprising, after the conversation I had with David about work, health care, and other domestic (as in national) gripes until much too late last night/early this morning. We're going to Turkey or Morocco or Algeria within the year, somehow or other. Your imagination is more qualified to fill in the gaps than is my ability to explain how we arrived at the conclusion.

I keep hyperventilating and yawning. That is an issue for the 'quitting' thread. Without having to see a doctor, I can pretty well infer that if this isn't walking pneumonia (somewhat unlikely, given my age), then it's chronic bronchitis, which is usually exacerbated, if not directly caused, by smoking.

The first problem with the obvious answer--'Quit smoking right-fucking-now, dumbass'--is that I am certain that the last time I had a lingering respiratory infection like this in April, the situation was actually complicated by my attempt to quit smoking at the same time that I was trying to purge the illness. It was too much for my cilia to handle without laying me up totally useless for a couple of weeks, even with the whole giving in to taking antibiotics thing.

That's exactly what happened. I became so sick that I could not possibly have done anything productive for several weeks, which made me really depressed and generally got me into a funk that took a long time to get over. This is something that I cannot afford right now. It is not that I don't believe quitting is worth my time and effort, it's just that I would have to plan for the inevitable illness that would ensue, unless, of course, I start the quit project when I am relatively healthy in the first place. I know that this logic sounds counterintuitive or plain silly to a nonsmoker, or maybe even a lightly-addicted smoker, but the people who know what I mean will know what I mean.

...Which brings me to the next thing I have to think about. I want to try Chantix this time. I could spend hours explaining how I got from my general anti-pharmaceutical stance to this particular conclusion, but I've already done the work of thinking really hard about it, and so I won't. Suffice it to say that the resolution stems from observation of facts about my past attempts to quit. The problem with making it happen is a money issue.

I have the prescription already. I got it when I still had insurance from the public school job, and the doctor was happy to give it to me, even when I explained that I was not sure if or when I would want to have it filled. However, in my current insuranceless situation, enough of the drug to get me started would cost at least $100. This is another expense that I will need to plan for, and that cannot happen right now.

Looking at the research I can find about treating whatever chest crap I have going on right now, it appears that I may have enough Cipro left over from the neurotic doctor, (different one from the Chantix lady, who was awesome) who gave me way too much of it before I left for Guatemala, to self-medicate in the event that I get desperate to breathe more easily. I don't think I will need it, because the whole thing seems to be on the outs, but this is still a small comfort. I need to get a little better before I can think about going through the taxing experience of quitting.

This has been a brain-dump about bumblebee comrades covered in white dust and microbes covered in smoke. It is not yet time to set a quit date. I'll let you know when I get the memo.

Cora Brown's Garbage Can

This is a list of some of the items in Cora Brown’s trashcan.

1. A small stack of unopened greeting cards in multicolored envelopes. If you were to open them, they would read much the same: “My condolences” or “In your time of loss” etc. etc., followed by hand-written messages full of hollow assertions such as “She is in a better place now,” etc. etc. Cora knows that they are all the same, all similarly empty—it has taken her this three weeks since it happened to make up her mind. If she had thrown them away two weeks earlier, it might have been a vindictive kind of toss. She might have thought, “Fuck all of you,” and thrown them out with relish. But today, she was able to simply throw them away. She congratulates herself. Congratulations, Cora.

2. Five empty cigarette packs. Her family might be appalled if they knew that she has taken up smoking—at least, she assumes that this is the case. What she doesn’t know is that her youngest daughter Rebekah, the one with the quiet owlish eyes, knows that Cora has been smoking since one week after it happened—this was when Johnny and the children had started back at work and school but Cora remained at home, sitting on the front porch and gazing out over the lawn. Rebekah had found the ashtray out on the porch, and dumped it out in the trash before her father, her brother, or even Cora herself could notice that it was there. She had not told anyone about what she knew, and she had been helping her mother to hide the habit without her knowledge for the last two weeks. Cora will not be smoking for much longer now.

3. Plastic pie packages, instant rice box, plastic forks and knives, frozen casserole pans, and used paper towels. Cora usually does the grocery shopping, and had she been the one to go the last time, she might have bought the same kinds of quick fix-ups that her husband picked, but the difference is that had she done this herself, it would have felt like admitting defeat—it would have seemed too symbolic for her to bear. Johnny knew that she would feel guilty for not cooking her usual elaborate meals, and so he had thought it best to go ahead and buy all those things and take the resulting verbal chastisement like a man, and pretend that he had just gotten confused at the grocery store and bought the wrong things, just like a man. Congratulations, Johnny.

4. Empty cans of cat food. Cora’s friend Ruby gave her a Siamese kitten two days ago. Presently, she is fretting over it, feeding it too much, and laughing too loudly at its antics, as if to make her voice rise up over something that suffocates her. The Browns had fallen in love with the kitten immediately, desperately, and the soft thumps that its little feet make on the floor echo through the big house, punctuating the solemnity of the hours and minutes with moments of weightlessness. In fact, you don’t want to imagine what it would feel like to be in that house without a kitten right now. Good form, Ruby.

5. Wine bottles. Cora has always been a wine drinker, and she usually shows impeccable taste in her selections. Lately, however, she buys the largest bottles at the grocery store. These things happen when a hobby becomes a necessity.

6. Therapeutic hand-exercise ball. When it happened, Cora thought she couldn’t bear to part with anything that Ann Elizabeth had ever touched. For some number of days, this became her routine: she would go into the empty room and lie down on the empty bed, clutching some stuffed toy or article of clothing to her body, and weep torrentially into the pillow that still smelled like baby shampoo and the stale residue of exhaled breath. A few weeks later, though, she realized that it would not be fair to horde so many costly physical therapy accoutrements that less fortunate families needed for their own children. Just yesterday she dropped off most of the larger equipment at the hospital. But the little hand ball was different. It was the only one she could neither keep nor give away, because it had been Ann E.’s favorite object, the one thing that she used to keep in her hand for most of the day and sometimes even while she was asleep. Cora had been sleeping with it too. But this morning, Johnny saw her wake up and look at the ball for a few moments. Then she swung her legs over the side of the bed and padded into the kitchen on her bare feet. He had heard the crunch of papers in the bottom of the trash can, then Cora came back without the ball, slid between the sheets, and backed herself into the cave of her husband’s body.

7. A half-used package of maxi pads. When it happened, Ann E. had just turned sixteen. For the last three years, Cora and Rebekah had been developing a system for dealing with Ann E.’s menstrual cycle. By now, they had it down to a science—they could have written a dissertation on how two small women can lift a third body as big as each of their own to change a maxi pad, where to place the pad in the underpants of a wheelchair-bound girl so that it would not leak, and all the other considerations that no one anticipates before they are asked to come up with solutions for such things. Cora threw the pads away because she has already passed menopause—“Praise the Lord!” is all she has to say about that—and her remaining daughter is too young yet to need them.

8. A wedding invitation. Two days after her daughter’s funeral, Cora’s neice, who lives in the apartment upstairs, announced her engagement to her boyfriend. “…would like to announce the union of Dan Alphonse Carlson and Abigail Marie Brown…” Cora has done an excellent job hiding her disgust at this monumentally ungraceful gesture. Good job, Cora.

9. A set of floral-patterned curtains. Cora Brown decided this morning that some things are going to change. Starting with those hideous curtains in the bathroom.

confabulation defined

From wikipedia, 22 Feb. 2009: "the formation of false memories, perceptions, or beliefs about the self or the environment as a result of neurological or psychological dysfunction.^[1] When it is a matter of memory, confabulation is the confusion of imagination with memory, or the confused application of true memories.^[2]"